The story of how ‘Too Much Democracy’ was given a slickly marketed make-over to become ‘Just Right Democracy’ and was eaten up by a few Corporate Bears, who loved it so much. And, the story of how ‘Just Left Democracy’ was left with too little say and starved with its new best ‘forever’ friend, Poverty.

MECHANISMS OF COERCION: 63,000 rich and super-rich people possess $39 trillion in wealth, while 800 million starve.

By Snoopman

31 August 2013

Snoopman Editor’s Note: This article outlines how it is that the planet is currently on a trajectory of ‘colliding crises’. It traces the roots of the current ‘Crisis of Democracy’ back to the 1970s when a North Atlantic capitalist class viewed the counter-cultural movements that emerged in the 1960s as a threat to their power. The North Atlantic capitalist class resolved to undermine democracy by encouraging apathy (amid ‘free market reforms’ that they knew would bring hardship to many).

Consumer Warning: This article has a satirical tone, which is a genre that is best used when it ridicules the hypocrisies of the ruling classes. Satire used to be a commonplace television genre before the ‘free market’ era invoked fiscal discipline on television networks, for reasons that will be clearer as you read on. (See: Snoopman News for sourced references).

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Too Much Democracy

A Crisis of Democracy is felt most by those bearing the brunt of capitalist forces. Many activists, non-governmental organizations (NGOs) and activist scholars around the world have discerned that this current Crisis of Democracy is one of numerous ‘colliding crises’. Together, we travel on this trajectory of crises, which include: a global economic depression, systemic financial crimes, social destabilization, food shortages, environmental catastrophes, rampant militarism, and systemic poverty (that implicitly renders a ‘global poor’ population as ‘surplus’ to a ‘global free market project’).[i]

This Crisis of Democracy is actually the property of a ‘Crisis Family’. Democracy has siblings. They are called: Social Justice, Environment, Peace, Anti-War, and the non-identical twins, Human Needs and Human Rights. (Human Needs is the older and terribly neglected of the two, while the younger twin has been seriously abused). The story gets sadder. All of these siblings of the Crisis Family are all famous orphans. And sadder still, there are less-well known ones too.

I use this familial metaphor because an orphan to one family, say a Bottom, Middle or even an Upper Class one, is potentially a ‘blank canvas’ to a Psychopathic Family. As psychopathy expert Clive Boddy has argued in his paper entitled, The Corporate Psychopaths Theory of the Global Financial Crisis, a psychopath is a person who deviously wins the confidence of his or her intended victims, for whom the psychopath lacks empathy.[ii] At this point, I’m going to climb out on a limb of the Human Family Tree and argue that it is from this particular limb that the world is run. Upon this limb dwell the world’s economically, politically and militarily powerful psychopaths. It’s a ‘special branch’ of the Human Family (he tangata whänau).

The trajectory of colliding crises has a sinister underbelly. The intent of elite policy planners, four decades ago, was to exploit these colliding crises for their economic, political and military gain. The current Crisis of Democracy has occurred because ordinary people all over the world were systematically encouraged to feel hopelessness about struggling for worthy causes. This planning for what I call systemic apathy began in the early- to mid-1970s, because the ‘counter-cultural revolution’ that appeared in the 1960s was regarded by a North Atlantic capitalist class as an affront to their perceived right to permanently rule the planet.

Indeed, as a term, Crisis of Democracy, was coined by a global policy-shaping group called the Trilateral Commission. In its 1975 report called, “The Crisis of Democracy”, the view expressed by the Trilateral Commission was that there was too much democracy. Chase Manhattan Bank chairman, David Rockefeller, founded The Trilateral Commission in 1973. (At the time, Rockefeller also chaired another global policy-shaping group, a New York-based think tank, the Council on Foreign Relations, which shared this too muchdemocracy view). The Trilateral Commission called for powerful new economic management stratagems. “The Crisis of Democracy” report sought to instill discipline among the mass populaces of the developed countries through proactive labour intervention and skills development, and among the developing countries, by “tying neocolonial economies even closer to Western finance.”[iii] The new economic framework that a sect within the North Atlantic capitalist class favoured was ‘free markets’.

This sect, that had begun field-testing ‘free markets’ in the mid-1960s, came to be known as the neoliberal movement. Their ‘Holy Grail’ was ‘efficient’ price mechanisms allegedly governed by an ‘invisible hand’. However, this Invisible Hand turned out to be a Wealth Defence Industry that had all along been quietly constructing a world-wide, state-sponsored Financial Secrecy Haven Complex. This means that the North Atlantic capitalist class has assumed political power over economic matters so that their vast, anti-competitive transnationalised cartels could control new ‘free markets’. Therefore, the ‘global neoliberal project’ is more accurately a ‘global neo-colonialist project’.[iv]

The emergence of ‘too much democracy’ in the 1960s was known in posh elite circles as a ‘governance crisis’. This ‘Crisis of Democracy’ coincided with several other major crises. One crisis beset the ‘Patriarch’ of the Crisis Whanau, and that was The Crisis of Declining Profit Rates (NoooOOOOOOO!!!).This crisis arose from the overcapacity of production, and became a most ‘serious crisis’ for the dominant corporations of the North Atlantic capitalist class (particularly the United States and Britain, who had only partially re-tooled in the years since World War II). It was a most‘serious crisis’ because there is only one thing that can “kill [a] bloodless legal construct” – the Corporation – and that is an inability to extract a financial surplus (as Thomas Kessner put it in his book Capital City).[v] As implied earlier, it was a crisis of the Patriarch’s own making, since he had sought to dominate the post-World War II World. Thus, the Crisis of Declining Profit Rates was really a shadow-self of the Crisis Family’s Patriarch: Capital.[vi]

Another, and largely forgotten, crisis known as ‘Developmentalism’, sought political and economic autonomy for the neocolonial economies of the ‘developing world’. The perpetually ‘developing’ countries were demanding Western technology so they could ‘develop’, as a ‘fair trade’ for having supplied the raw materials for the ‘long post-war boom’.[vii]

A few conniving Corporate Bears

To ‘solve’ these crises, a special study group was sponsored in the early 1970s by the Council on Foreign Relations in New York to work on what they called the ‘1980s Project’. Essentially, this study group was tasked with ‘solving’ crises that their predecessors had caused in their attempts to control the world through oil and finance. As William Engdahl argued in his book The Gods of Money (2009), during World War II, the Council on Foreign Relations sponsored a War and Peace Studies Group (p.136-165). This Studies Group was comprised of elite policy planners who worked out how the United States would dominate the post-World War II world. Their work underpinned what became known as the Bretton Woods Agreement of 1944, which secured control over petroleum and finance for the United States (with its fraternal partner, Britain becoming its best supporting political actor). It was this Bretton Woods Agreement, which eventually broke down in the late 1960s and early 1970s when global capitalism faced the three major crises mentioned.

The ‘1980s Project’ Study Group worked out a blueprint for the transformation of economies around the globe under the rubric of ‘free market’ economic policies.[viii] The 1980s Project prescribed a new alliance between the wealthy and politically connected Corporate Bears of America and Europe to include Baby Corporate Bear, Japan. To this end, the Trilateral Commission was formed. The Trilateral Commission was tasked with working out how to technically deploy the ‘free market’ framework and preserve as far as possible the dominance of their Trilateral World, as Laurence Shoup and William Minter have argued in their seminal book, Imperial Brain Trust.

In the ‘governance crisis’ discourses of the time, it was considered vital for the success of the 1980’s Project that apathy be created among the mass populaces of the world. It was deemed crucial by the elite policy planners at the Council on Foreign Relations to “depoliticize” important issues and remove them from popular political consciousness.[ix] Indeed, one task force group in the ‘1980’s Project’ was to focus on ways to downplay political-economic conflicts, including unemployment, inflation and international relations. Audaciously, “The Crisis of Democracy” report by the Trilateral Commission claimed that popular demands on governments were overwhelming authorities to address various crises. Furthermore, governance itself was facing a Crisis of Legitimacy!

In this way, the mass populaces of the world had angered the matriarchal figure of democracy, Liberty, and had inadvertently exposed her shadow self – her Crisis of Legitimacy. Here, it needs to recalled, or known, that representative democracy, or limited democracy, based on the Westminster parliamentary system was spread around the world as a strategy to protect the extremely wealthy from the riskiness of “pure” or participatory democracy, as Noam Chomsky, an expert in US foreign policy, pointed out in the 1994 documentary Manufacturing Consent.[x]

The ‘offending’ counter-cultural/peoples’ movements of the 1960s and 1970s included: the Civil Rights, Feminism, Anti-war, Peace, Environment, New Left, Free Speech, Gay Liberation, United Farmworker Movement, and Developmentalism. Together, their collective rejection of authority represented a combined yearning from ‘below’ to construct autonomous communities.[xi] Because their demands, in effect, sought political and economic equality, or a decentralization of power and redistribution of wealth, these popular movements were regarded as threats to the ruling North Atlantic capitalist class. From the perspective of the Patriarch and Matriarch of the Crisis Family – Capital and Liberty – the Bottom and Middle Classes needed to be taught to feel powerless and give up their ‘newly-born movements’.

The stratagem to undermine too much democracy contained in the 1980’s Project, which essentially sought to demoralize mass populaces (both in the ethical sense, as well as the motivational one), was therefore a devious one. Indeed, the ‘free market’ framework that was worked upon by the 1980’s Project Study Group and elite planners at other right-wing corporate-funded global and national policy-shaping think tanks, (which proliferated in 1970s) came packaged with a cover-story to hide the real intent. ‘Free markets’ were slickly marketed in the 1980s and 1990s with the idea that they would deliver individual freedom and prosperity for all, as Naomi Klein argued in her book, The Shock Doctrine: The Rise of Disaster Capitalism. The North Atlantic capitalist class (now transnational in scope) had embarked on a ‘war of position’ as William Carroll called it in his book The Making of a Transnational Capital Class.[xii]

To ensure they won this ‘war of position’, the neoliberal movement followed a stratagem espoused by the sect’s leading proponent Milton Friedman, a professor of Economics at the University of Chicago, who favoured a ‘shock therapy’ approach, as encapsulated by his mantra: “speed, suddenness and scope”.[xiii] In this way, targeted populations were overwhelmed with the economic shocks as whole sectors of society were transformed and coerced to support the new framework. These ‘free market shock treatments’ included lifting financial controls to increase the fluidity of capital flows between countries, the corporatization and privatization of state infrastructure and services, the introduction of user charges, shifting the tax burden ‘downward’, and down-sizing public sector employment. Thus, Friedman’s shock doctrine was a structured set of ‘new enclosures’ that were designed to absorb the needs, values and aspirations of the ‘disobedient’.[xiv]

In other words, key insiders that comprised the North Atlantic capitalist class set a course to transform the world under a ‘free market’ framework in order to impose ‘market discipline’. The ‘Patriarchal and Matriarchal forces’ – Capital and Liberty – that comprised this North Atlantic capitalist class hated it that their shadow selves, the Crisis of Declining Profit Rates and the Crisis of Legitimacy, respectively, had been exposed. Once Capital and Liberty regained their composure, and reinvented themselves as the neoliberal movement, they downplayed the hardships that their ‘reforms’ would impose. Together, Capital and Liberty disingenuously claimed that everyone would prosper and through this promised prosperity, they would somehow gain ‘freedom’.[xv]

The importance of earnestly starving Just Left Democracy

In a classic ‘bait and switch’ manoeuvre, the masses were offered freedom and prosperity in the future if they gave up their offspring in the present: Social Justice, Environment, Peace, Anti-War, Developmentalism and the non-identical twins, Human Needs and Human Rights. These, too, were to be managed by the ‘market forces’ and the administrative system of the Transnational Capitalist Class: Just Right Democracy.[xvi] The intention that underpinned the marketing of ‘free markets’ was to deceptively lure the world’s mass-hapless populaces into orphaning their ‘newly-born movements’, which were left to struggle as Just Left Democracy. It was, therefore, a poorly understood ‘bargain’. Thus, the principle upon which the ‘global neo-colonial project’ is based, is one of structural entrapment, wherein people were tricked into losing protections of law with the apparent ‘red-tape’-cutting rhetoric of de-regulation.

But, in this bait-and-switch manoeuvre, a re-regulation occurred wherein the state gained more power to fine, charge tolls and tax while facilitating the construction of a world-wide Financial-Secrecy Haven Complex.[xvii] In short, citizens in ‘free-market’ regimes are more intensively compelled to perform on obligations of public and private debt. On the one hand, such regimes have unlimited capacity to produce, enforce and bind nationally-based citizenries to commercial law. On the other hand, ‘free-market’ capitalist states expanded levels of debt creation by ‘borrowing’ credit under the coercion of an international banking cartel, while dominant capitalist coalitions outsourced production to ‘developing countries’. Hapless labour in ‘First World’ countries were thereby lured into debt as they failed to suck-up this re-ordering of the world (in futile individualist attempts to avoid the lowered living standards that competing with the expanded labour pool implied). [xviii]

Thus, citizens in ‘free market’ regimes were lured into breaches of commercial law as they failed to perform to their obligations, not only on contracts they would not have otherwise signed, such as credit contracts (since their choices had been structurally narrowed). But also, because ‘free market’ states had intensified mass populaces’ exposure to implied contracts, by favouring commercial law over treaties, constitutional obligations and common law (case law) that had protected human rights. Due to the pervasiveness of capitalism, jurisdictions are prejudiced to favour implied contracts that underpin commercial law. This means that as the harmful ‘free market’ economic frameworks were spread, third parties were able to pass on the rights and liabilities “constructed upon the circumstances”, such as engineered financial and economic crises, without the participation, consent or knowledge of the state citizenry, as Lee Brobst and A. F. Beddoe argued more generally in their paper, “U.S.A. the Republic, is the house that no one lives in”. Thus, through their ‘silence’, citizens were considered under commercial law to be in voluntary agreement with the ‘free-market’ system of ‘economic shock treatments’.

In commercial law, silence is taken as agreement because it is derived from international law, itself a derivative of Roman private civil law. Roman civil law was developed to protect oligarchical claims to wealth from the Roman land-based tax system created under a public federal law system. [xix] Therefore, Roman civil law was based on entrapment since its commercial advantage could only be gained through the collusive secret agreements, with the Roman state willingly facilitating such collusion. [xx]

A similar collusion underpinned the deployment of ”free-market’ regimes. Under neo-liberal policies, citizenries function as “goods in commerce” or as “human resources” and, in effect, have become human capital compelled to service debt created literally from nothing by a Global Banking Cartel. By developing commercial law to facilitate the construction of a Transnational Corporate Empire, nation states have, in effect, engaged in structural entrapment, because it is increasingly likely masses of citizens will break the law to survive.[xxi]

In this way, under ‘free-market’ capitalist regimes, ordinary people have been compelled to work on the transnational capitalists’ global neo-colonial project in exchange for their survival. The true cost to humanity is that the tiny-little people have been tricked into re-constructing slavery. Because slavery is unlawful in most countries, an international banking fraternity, who wanted to maintain their power, devised a form of slavery that would be invisible: debt enslavement.[xxii]

Thus, key-insiders that comprise the state apparatus of major and significant nations have conspired and colluded with their counterparts in the corporate sector to lure people into entrenching an economic system of owning people through government and corporate bonds. Because public and private debt is funded by the issuance of government and corporate bonds, respectively, ‘citizens’ and ‘consumers’ are compelled to fund public and private institutions (that are ultimately controlled by super-wealthy oligarchs). In other words, the chains of bonded slaves have been replaced with the obligations of bonded taxpayers and ‘borrowers’.

The intention is make popular democratic participation, or Just Left Democracy, starve to death. It is, therefore, vital to the longevity of the global neo-colonial project that this systemic debt enslavement remains a little understood phenomenon.

[viii] ‘Free market shock treatments’ included lifting financial controls to increase the fluidity of capital flows between countries, the corporatization and privatization of state infrastructure and services, the introduction of user charges, shifting the tax burden ‘downward’, and down-sizing public sector employment. Thus, a structured set of ‘new enclosures’ were designed to absorb the needs, values and aspirations of the ‘disobedient’.

[ix] See: Douglas 1976: 493; Rose 1979: 369; Shoup & Minter 2004: 268-269. In his 1979 paper “Ungovernability: Is There Fire Behind the Smoke?” a professor at the Centre for Policy Studies, Richard Rose, observed that political indifference had been “underestimated” as means for states to maintain authority since it undermines people’s capacity for self-reliance and attention to the activities of authorities (p. 369). Rose saw that political scientists would need to develop a language to that could describe the variance of features that defined governments of the West. Gill and Law (1989) found that several think-tanks influenced the Thatcher regime, including the British Centre for Policy Studies, situated at Glasgow University, whose purpose was to reshape public opinion by means of a “battle of ideas” (Gill & Law, 1989, p. 482).

[xii] Carroll (2010: 205). Looking back on how the neoliberal rationalist paradigm came to be the dominant ideology of our time, BBC filmmaker Adam Curtis found in his 2007 documentary series, The Trap: Episode II, The Lonely Robot, that this ‘battle of ideas’ included the new language and thinking of a technocratic elite. Rationalism here means a methodological pattern of thought that is self-justifying, un-rooted to ethical considerations and which advocates efficiency based on a ready supply of answers that express no doubt (Saul, 1993). The regime of the neocolonial sect redefined workersas human resources and human capital that would perform to ‘numbers’ to fit with the ideology’s central demand: efficiency.

[xiv] Between the mid-1960s and 1970s, five countries in the ‘developing world’ that pursued an economic framework called ‘developmentalism’, were subsequently subjected to military juntas and/or CIA backed coups (Klein 2007: 87). Under a developmentalism framework, the state uses tax-funds to invest in infrastructure and services, subsidizes local industry and imposes high tariffs on imports (Klein 2007: 55). These economic policies were considered as an affront to the expansionist interests of European and American transnational corporations, and were rapidly replaced with ‘free market economic shock’ policies (Klein 2007:55-128; Jarecki 2006). The hapless countries that suffered military juntas and/or CIA backed coups, were Brazil in 1964, Indonesia in 1965, Chile and Uruguay in 1973 and Argentina in 1976. Klein argued in her book The Shock Doctrine that key insiders of the neoliberal sect, who comprised part of the North Atlantic capitalist class, sought to cleanse ‘free market’ ideology of its association with the terrorism meted-out during its field-testing stage (p.198-128). Klein also argued that the use of military violence to facilitate the spread of ‘free markets’ has continued into the 2000s. Her view is supported in Eugene Jarecki’s documentary Why We Fight (2006).

[xvi] Numerous corporate-funded foundations founded and/or sponsored an array of cause-focused non-governmental organizations in the 1970s (Klein 2007: 121-124; Engdahl 2004: 143-147). From the perspective of the super-rich, the public and private sectors are viewed as two divisions of capitalism, and democracy as its administrative system (Nitzan & Bichler 2009).